111–120 of 333 posts
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It is possible for a person to be bisexual.
I thought the line (as men in New York are known to do) as being the offputting one. It’s not needed and completely biased.
The author doesn't disparage the ex-boyfriend, just makes a tongue-in-cheek comment about it. I don't find it biased or off-putting.
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Nobody is compelled to take methamphetamines or heroin, especially not the first time. Yes, physical addiction is a beastly problem beyond simply quitting cold turkey - but you sort of put yourself in that boat to begin with. It's a bit like not knowing how to swim, and deciding to jump into the ocean. If you don't know how to swim, don't jump in the ocean.
"A study of young, urban injection drug users interviewed in 2008 and 2009 found that 86 percent had used opioid pain relievers nonmedically prior to using heroin... Of people entering treatment for heroin addiction who began abusing opioids in the 1960s, more than 80 percent started with heroin. Of those who began abusing opioids in the 2000s, 75 percent reported that their first opioid was a prescription drug."[0]…
Even if that correlation shows causation, that's a big jump to: > What if they're being intentionally coerced by pharma?
> Still, when my parents told me they were going to give me about $2,000 a month, [...] I took it, spent part of it helping my then-boyfriend pay off his student loans and put the rest in the bank. > When my boyfriend suddenly left me (as men in New York are occasionally known to do), I had to pay $1,450 a month for rent on my own ($17,400 a year) on the lease we had just started, not including utilities. I quickly d…
A refrain that is very true in NYC. It is a bit off-putting (and just wrong) to read the author talk about white male privilege being a comparable head start to her half a million dollars of family money she’s received. (And 28,000/yr still coming!) For an essay centered on owning up to personal privilege it still has some serious short comings in recognizing how extreme her wealth privilege is versus almost all intr…
Consider that even well-known black movie stars occasionally get the "shopping while black" treatment. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/19/forest-whitaker-fa... Having even absurd amounts of money doesn't make bias just go away.
> That’s a $22.4 million of unearned income for the children of the rich, whereas the working class get taxed on their first dollar earned. A person could at least argue that my parents earned the capital they live off of. But me? I didn’t actually earn it.
Nitpick, but this is not quite true. There is the Earned Income Credit, as well as various welfare payments that working class are entitled to.
Small sample size, but I happen to know multiple people in their thirties and forties whose parents continue to fund their 'creative' lives. I can assure you they are not as happy as you think free money might make you.
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Yes, obviously, we should strive to not improve anything. Having the occasional bright spot punctuating the gloom of history is such a waste of time. /s
How about maintaining some sense of balance, responsibility, and austerity in our societies, instead of forever marching towards a fictional leisure-filled utopia?
Plus, the parents apparently paid at least $250k in college tuition for her. So she has world class education, zero debt from it, and then this stipend on top of that . The stipend wouldn't go anywhere near as far if she were saddled with crushing student loans. I come from a more privileged background than I realized and that included better educational opportunities. I was in gifted programs as early as second grad…
And yet if you even dare to open up the argument that government should try to encourage the types of families and behavior that show the best results for this type of childhood, you'll immediately be drowned out in ad hominem attacks. Even Obama took a lot of heat for saying dad's should help raise their kids. Never mind more seriously statically relevant approaches like waiting until after high school and marriage…
I disagree with her premise that the government should fund people to have fulfilling creative careers. That's not how the world works. Creative outputs generally do not have 'efficienciecy' increases like other fields. Creative outputs are zero sum: people only have a constant amount of time to use to consume creative outputs and consumption time has already been saturated. Efficiency upgrades for entertainment are…
I disagree heavily with this. There's been a lot of improvement in the quality and variety of entertainment too over the years not just the technology used to deliver them. If restricted to media from say mid century America post TV most people would be bored stiff by the material available. It's REALLY easy to wind up with a dismissive attitude towards the arts growing up and working in tech but never forget how muc…
cities would be terrible without public art for example, they would be dull, gray concrete silos of empty existance.
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> Maybe this isn't the right place to ask, but could someone explain the rationale for taxing gifts within a family? Could you explain the rationale for excluding such unearned income, other than privileging generational wealth against wealth earned by personal work and investment? > Ignoring the possibility of using it to circumvent an income tax, etc., my initial thought is that if my dad wants to give me $30,001 t…
> Could you explain the rationale for excluding such unearned income, other than privileging generational wealth against wealth earned by personal work and investment? If I buy a round of drinks, do people have to pay tax? (I assume there's some minimum threshold)
Taxes are usually paid each time money moves hands.